Overview

Bj rn Lomborg s iconoclastic The Skeptical Environmentalist sent shockwaves through the community of environmental scientists and activists. On August 1st 2002, Nick Schulz, editor at TechCentralStation wrote:

When Bj rn Lomborg s book The Skeptical Environmentalist was published a little over a year ago it caused an immediate sensation in the United States and Europe for its unconventionally optimistic take on environmental matters. At the time, I asked Ronald Bailey, the author and editor of two books on the environment and the foremost expert in the United States on the intersection of science policy and political controversy, what he thought of the book. Lomborg doesn t have a clue what s about to happen to him, Bailey said. I feel sorry for him. Bailey was right.

It was one of the few books to get negative reviews in both Science (November 9, 2001) and Nature (November 8, 2001). In their review in Nature, No Need to Worry about the Future, which dealt with the biological aspects (including lost biodiversity) of Lomborg s analysis, Stuart Pimm and Jeff Harvey, introduced an innovative and intrusive style of scientific discourse, which they apparently believed to give their arguments added weight:

The text [of The Skeptical Environmentalist ] employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men aren t dying of AIDS, that Jews weren t singled out by the Nazis for extermination, and so on.

A few months later, in January 2002, Scientific American magazine even devoted 11 pages to a special section titled, Science Defends Itself Against...